While I知 here I feel I should give you all the greatest gift a reader can give to another. We池e a dying breed, you and I, but we cannot weep for ourselves, no, we must rejoice with those still reading, and furthermore, still writing, and there are few places on the internet so wholesome in the spirit of literature as The Velvet, the official discussion forum for the works of Will Christopher Baer, Craig Clevenger and Stephen Graham Jones. The forum, however, is not what I mean to bring you to. The bell tolls for those authors.

There are so few writers, reading whom being more than a pleasure, it becomes an inspiration to craft stories and swagger and sway about with the opiate musk of their prose. The above authors do that to a near homicidal degree. So a few words on each, Stephen Graham Jones first, and the others I will get round to in a bit. This is because I just read through the links while writing this, and now I知 desperate to go write, actually. So, yeah, hitting submit now.

Stephen Graham Jones is prolific to a grotesque degree, he has short stories everywhere, always quality and a new novel every second month, it seems. You値l find plenty of short stories linked to from his website. Few people manage to even talk as contagiously about writing as he does, and an interview with him here, and a review below.

From Publishers Weekly, on All The Beautiful SinnersThis second novel by Jones follows Texas Deputy Sheriff Jim Doe in his chase after the Tin Man, a sociopath who has been abducting Indian children in the heartland for a decade. Jones, who is a member of the Blackfeet Nation, infuses this cleverly plotted detective story with Indian lore: the Tin Man enters Indian homes during tornadoes, always kidnapping a pair of children-a brother and sister-bringing to life an old Indian belief that storms sometimes take a malicious human form. As he tracks the Tin Man along dusty Texas highways andsmall towns across the country, Doe, who is also Indian, must face his own troubled family history, which includes a mother who abandoned his family and a sister who has been missing for nearly 20 years. The book masterfully plays with the serial killer genre, walking a line between convention and invention and delving into the psychology of both killer and detective. The plot is chilling in itself, but Jones's brisk, clean, visceral prose gives the novel its edgy suspense; excerpt here.